Rwanda

Rwanda
Chapter 17
Words without deeds violates the moral and legal obligation we have under the genocide convention but, more importantly, violates our sense of right and wrong and the standards we have as human beings about looking to care for one another.
Jon Corzine
For us, genocide was the gas chamber - what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
The international community must move beyond apology to a collective determination to ensure that 'never again' shall these tragic events be allowed to occur. Ibrahim Gambari
OUR STRENGTH LIES IN OUR INTENSIVE ATTACKS AND OUR BARBARITY...AFTER ALL, WHO TODAY REMEMBERS THE GENOCIDE OF THE ARMENIANS? ADOLF HITLER



First They Came for the Jews
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for meand there was no one left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller, 1945

The Berlin Conference and the Division of Africa

By the mid 1800’s, Western nations had established colonies all along the African coast. Africa provided a source of cheap labor, raw materials and new markets for these countries, which were going through the Industrial Revolution. These colonizing countries, however, began to compete with each other over control. They decided to hold a conference to set up ground rules for colonizing Africa. In 1884, at the invitation of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, representatives of all European nations, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire met at Berlin to consider problems arising out of European penetration of Africa. In the process of this conference, Africa was arbitrarily divided into various nations and territories, without regard to the cultures, histories, languages or religions shared by different groups of people within Africa. They often divided an ethnic group or brought enemies together under one government. The map of Africa remains much the same today as it did when it was divided in 1884.
The region that was to become Rwanda was given to Germany. German colonists arrived in 1890 and found a centrally governed and efficiently run country made up of people who shared a common culture, language and religion. After the end of World War I, Germany’s imperial holdings were passed to other nations. In the case of Rwanda, it went to the Belgians.

Above: Africa after the Berlin Conference Above: Africa today

Rwanda
The Republic of Rwanda is a small landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa, bordered by Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. Home to approximately 10.1 million people, Rwanda supports the densest population in continental Africa, with most of the population engaged in subsistence agriculture. A verdant country of fertile and hilly terrain, the small republic bears the title "Land of a Thousand Hills" (French: Pays des Mille Collines; Kinyarwanda: Igihugu cy'Imisozi Igihumbi).
The country has garnered international attention most markedly for the infamous Rwandan Genocide of 1994, in which 800,000-1,000,000 ethnic Tutsis were murdered by the Hutu majority. In 2008 Rwanda became the first country in history to elect a majority female national legislature.
Capital
(and largest city) Kigali
Official languages: Kinyarwanda, French, English Demonym Rwandan, Rwandese Government: Republic - President Paul Kagame - Prime Minister Bernard Makuza Independence: from Belgium - Date July 1, 1962 Area - Total 26,798 km² (147th)
10,169 sq mi


What are the differences between the Hutus and the Tutsis?

Origins

The ideas surrounding real and supposed ethnic groups in Rwanda have a very long and complicated history. The definitions of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" may have changed through time and location. Societal structures were not identical throughout Rwanda. There was clearly a Tutsi aristocracy that was distinguished from Tutsi commoners, and wealthy Hutu were often indistinguishable from upper class Tutsi. When the German colonists conducted their censuses, they desired to classify the people throughout Rwanda-Urundi with a single classification scheme. They merely defined "Tutsi" as anyone with more than ten cows or a long nose. The "European-like" noses of some Rwandans, invoked historical and racial theories to explain how some Africans acquired such noses. According to these early twentieth-century Europeans such organization and such noses could only be explained by European descent, transmitted by way of Ethiopia. Modern day genetic studies on the y-chromosome show the Tutsi to be 100% indigenous African with little to no East African genetic influence. In fact, the Tutsis are most genetically similar to the Hutu.

Culture

In much of Rwanda a centralized system of monarchy, based on the Tutsi monarch, the Mwami, existed. In the northwest of Rwanda (predominantly a Hutu area), the society more resembled that of Bugandan society, with large regional landholders instead of a central monarch.
Today there is little difference between the cultures of the Tutsi and Hutu; both groups speak the same language. Traditionally the rate of intermarriage has been very high, and relations between the groups were considered peaceful until the 20th century. Tutsi men rarely took Hutu wives, while Hutu men often took Tutsi wives. The ethnicity of the father determined the ethnicity of the children, however, which partially contributes to the continued larger proportion of Hutu in the region. Many have concluded that Tutsi is mainly an expression of class or caste, therefore, rather than ethnicity. Experts dispute whether similarities between Hutus and Tutsis are from common ancestry, frequent intermarriage, or both. The separation of the groups are sufficiently profound, however, that in any community in Rwanda, everyone knows who is Hutu and who is Tutsi; the genocide demonstrated a level of ethnically-based hatred that is hard to explain simply on colonial "definitions".
One cultural difference noted by school principals during the 1980s was that although secondary school intakes were governed by quotas mandated by the Habyarimana government (in line with the proportions of the tribes within the country), and by competition within tribes, the students of Tutsi origin (14% of intake) on average demonstrated a much stronger drive to succeed, with the result that by the end of secondary school, the Tutsi usually were nearer 50% of graduates. (This argument was the same one used by the apartheid government in South Africa to justify educational favoritism for Europeans in that country.) This tended to result in accusations of "favoring the Tutsis", and was a contributor to the animosity of some in the genocide.
The Tutsi were ruled by a king (the mwami) from the 15th century until 1961. The monarchy was abolished by the Belgians, in response to the desires of both Tutsi and Hutu, following a national referendum leading up to independence.

Colonial influences

Both Germany (before World War I) and Belgium ruled the area in a colonial capacity. The Germans theorized that the Tutsi were not originally from sub-Saharan Africa at all. They thought that they had immigrated from somewhere else. When the Belgians took over the colony in 1916 from the Germans, they felt that the colony would be better governed if they continued to classify the different races in a hierarchical form. They felt that Africans in general were children who needed to be guided, but noted the Tutsi to be the ruling culture in Rwanda-Urundi. In 1959 the Belgian reversed their stance and allowed the majority Hutu to assume control of the government through universal elections. The Hutu and Tutsi relationship is very different in Burundi and Rwanda. In Rwanda, a backlash of oppression against the Tutsi by the Hutu led to many cultural conflicts, including the Rwandan Genocide. In Burundi, the Tutsi led a genocide that killed an estimated 500,000 Hutus in 1972.
When Rwanda and Burundi were German colonies (known as German East Africa) the colonial government gave special status to the Tutsi, in part because they believed them to possess racial superiority. They appeared to the Germans tall and handsome, while they thought the Hutu short and homely. As a result it became colonial policy that only Tutsis could be educated and only Tutsis could participate in the colonial government. Needless to say, since the Hutus were in the majority such policies engendered some intense hostility between the groups, who had been peaceful enough with each other before colonization. The situation was exacerbated when the Belgians assumed control following World War I. Recognizing their ignorance of this part of Africa, they sought advice from the Germans, who told them to stay with the Tutsis, which they did. This is the colonial back story to the horrific events in 1994.


What is Genocide?
The term "genocide" did not exist before 1944. It is a very specific term, referring to violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group. Human rights, as laid out in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concern the rights of individuals not groups.
In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of the European Jews. He formed the word "genocide" by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. In proposing this new term, Lemkin had in mind "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." The next year, the International Military Tribunal held at Nuremberg, Germany, charged top Nazis with "crimes against humanity." The word “genocide” was included in the indictment, but as a descriptive, not legal, term.
On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in no small part due to the tireless efforts of Lemkin himself, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention establishes "genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
While many cases of group-targeted violence have occurred throughout history and even since the Convention came into effect, the legal and international development of the term is concentrated into two distinct historical periods: the time from the coining of the term until its acceptance as international law (1944-1948) and the time of its activation with the establishment of international criminal tribunals to prosecute the crime of genocide (1991-1998). Preventing genocide, the other major obligation of the convention, remains a challenge that nations and individuals continue to face.


Genocide Timeline
This is a timeline noting the major conceptual and legal advances in the development of "genocide." It does not attempt to detail all cases which might be considered as genocides, but rather how the term becomes a part of the political, legal, and ethical vocabulary of responding to widespread threats of violence against groups.
1900: Raphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin, who would later coin the word "genocide," is born into a Polish Jewish family in 1900. His memoirs detail early exposure to the history of Ottoman attacks against Armenians (which most scholars believe constitute genocide), anti-Semitic attacks, and other histories of group-targeted violence as key to forming his beliefs about the need for legal protection of groups.
1933: Rise of Adolf Hitler
With the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor on Jan 30, 1933, the Nazi Party took control of Germany. In October, German delegates walked out of disarmament talks in Geneva and Nazi Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. In October, at an international legal conference in Madrid, Raphael Lemkin proposed legal measures to protect groups. His proposal did not receive support.
1939: World War II
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland triggering a treaty-mandated Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet army occupied the eastern half of Poland. Lemkin fled Poland, escaping across the Soviet Union and eventually arriving in the United States.
1941: A crime without a name
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. As the German forces advanced further east, SS, police, and military personnel carried out atrocities that moved British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to state in August 1941: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” In December 1941, the United States entered World War II on the side of the Allied forces. Lemkin, who arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1941, had heard of Churchill’s speech and later claimed that his introduction of the word “genocide” was in part a response to Churchill’s statement.
1944: "Genocide" coined
Nazi leadership embarked on a variety of population policies aimed at restructuring the ethnic composition of Europe by force, using mass murder as a tool. Included among these policies and involving mass murder were the attempt to murder all European Jews, which we now refer to as the Holocaust, the attempt to murder most of the Gypsy (Roma) population of Europe, and the attempt to physically liquidate the leadership classes of Poland and the former Soviet Union. Also included in these policies were numerous smaller scale resettlement policies involving the use of brutal force and murder that we now refer to as a form of ethnic cleansing. In 1944, Raphael Lemkin, who had moved to Washington, D.C. and worked with the U.S. War Department, coined the word “genocide” in his text Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. This text documented patterns of destruction and occupation throughout Nazi-held territories.
1945-1946: International Military Tribunal
Between November 20, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg tried 22 major Nazi German leaders on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit each of these crimes. It was the first time that international tribunals were used as a post-war mechanism for bringing national leaders to justice. The word “genocide” was included in the indictment, but as a descriptive, not legal, term.
1947-1948: Creating an international convention on genocide
Raphael Lemkin was a critical force for bringing “genocide” before the newly formed United Nations, where delegates from around the world debated the terms of an international law on genocide. On December 8, 1948, the final text was adopted unanimously. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide entered into force on January 12, 1951, after more than 20 countries from around the world ratified it (not including the United States).
1950-1987: Cold war
Massive crimes against civilian populations were all too common in the years after World War II and throughout the Cold War. Whether these situations constituted “genocide” was scarcely considered by the countries that had undertaken to prevent and punish that crime by joining the Genocide Convention.
1988: U.S. signs the Genocide Convention
On November 5, 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. The Convention had faced strong opponents, who argued it would infringe on US national sovereignty, and supporters. One of the Convention’s strongest advocates, Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin delivered over 3,000 speeches advocating the Convention in Congress from 1968-1987.
1991-1995: Wars of the former Yugoslavia
The wars of the former Yugoslavia were marked by massive war crimes and crimes against humanity. The conflict in Bosnia (1992- 1995), brought some of the harshest fighting and worst massacres to Europe since World War II. In one small town, Srebrenica, 7,800 Bosnjiak men and boys were murdered by Serbian forces.
1993: Resolution 827
In response to the atrocities occurring in Bosnia, the United Nations Security Council issued resolution 827, establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. It was the first international criminal tribunal since Nuremberg. Crimes the ICTY can prosecute and try are: grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Its jurisdiction is limited to crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
1994: Genocide in Rwanda
From April until July, up to 800,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi minority group, were killed in Rwanda. It was killing on a devastating scale, scope, and speed. In October, the UN Security Council extended the mandate of the ICTY to include a separate but linked tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), located in Arusha, Tanzania.
1998: First conviction for genocide
On September 2, 1998, the ICTR issued the world’s first conviction for genocide in an international tribunal when Jean-Paul Akayesu was judged guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity for acts he engaged in and oversaw as mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba.
While these tribunals and the emerging International Criminal Court help establish legal precedents and investigate crimes within their jurisdictions, punishment of genocide remains a difficult task. Even more difficult is the continuing challenge to prevent genocide.
2004: Genocide in Darfur
For the first time U.S. government history, an ongoing crisis is referred to as “genocide.” On September 9, 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "We concluded -- I concluded -- that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the Government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility -- and that genocide may still be occurring."


Rwanda: How the genocide happened

Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.
Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.
Even for a country with such a turbulent history as Rwanda, the scale and speed of the slaughter left its people reeling.
The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.
Within hours of the attack, a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later.
But the death of the president was by no means the only cause of Africa's largest genocide in modern times.

History of violence
Ethnic tension in Rwanda is nothing new. There have been always been disagreements between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, but the animosity between them has grown substantially since the colonial period.
The two ethnic groups are actually very similar - they speak the same language, inhabit the same areas and follow the same traditions.
But when the Belgian colonists arrived in 1916, they saw the two groups as distinct entities, and even produced identity cards classifying people according to their ethnicity. The Belgians considered the Tutsis as superior to the Hutus. Not surprisingly, the Tutsis welcomed this idea, and for the next 20 years they enjoyed better jobs and educational opportunities than their neighbors.
Resentment among the Hutus gradually built up, culminating in a series of riots in 1959. More than 20,000 Tutsis were killed, and many more fled to the neighbouring countries of Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda.
When Belgium relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutus took their place. Over subsequent decades, the Tutsis were portrayed as the scapegoats for every crisis.

Building up to genocide
This was still the case in the years before the genocide. The economic situation worsened and the incumbent president, Juvenal Habyarimana, began losing popularity. At the same time, Tutsi refugees in Uganda - supported by some moderate Hutus - were forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Their aim was to overthrow Habyarimana and secure their right to return to their homeland.
Habyarimana chose to exploit this threat as a way to bring dissident Hutus back to his side, and Tutsis inside Rwanda were accused of being RPF collaborators.
In August 1993, after several attacks and months of negotiation, a peace accord was signed between Habyarimana and the RPF, but it did little to stop the continued unrest. When Habyarimana's plane was shot down at the beginning of April 1994, it was the final nail in the coffin.
Exactly who killed the president - and with him the president of Burundi and many chief members of staff - has not been established.
Whoever was behind the killing its effect was both instantaneous and catastrophic.

Mass murder
In Kigali, the presidential guard immediately initiated a campaign of retribution. Leaders of the political opposition were murdered, and almost immediately, the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began.
Within hours, recruits were dispatched all over the country to carry out a wave of slaughter.
The early organizers included military officials, politicians and businessmen, but soon many others joined in the mayhem.
Encouraged by the presidential guard and radio propaganda, an unofficial militia group called the Interahamwe (meaning those who attack together) was mobilized. At its peak, this group was 30,000-strong.
Soldiers and police officers encouraged ordinary citizens to take part. In some cases, Hutu civilians were forced to murder their Tutsi neighbors by military personnel.
Participants were often given incentives, such as money or food, and some were even told they could appropriate the land of the Tutsis they killed.
On the ground at least, the Rwandans were largely left alone by the international community. UN troops withdrew after the murder of 10 soldiers.
The day after Habyarimana's death, the RPF renewed their assault on government forces, and numerous attempts by the UN to negotiate a ceasefire came to nothing.

Aftermath
Finally, in July, the RPF captured Kigali. The government collapsed and the RPF declared a ceasefire.
As soon as it became apparent that the RPF was victorious, an estimated two million Hutus fled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). These refugees include many who have since been implicated in the massacres.
Back in Rwanda, UN troops and aid workers then arrived to help maintain order and restore basic services.
On 19 July a new multi-ethnic government was formed, promising all refugees a safe return to Rwanda.
Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, was inaugurated as president, while the majority of cabinet posts were assigned to RPF members.
But although the massacres are over, the legacy of the genocide continues, and the search for justice has been a long and arduous one.
About 500 people have been sentenced to death, and another 100,000 are still in prison.
But some of the ringleaders have managed to evade capture, and many who lost their loved ones are still waiting for justice.

Interview with Phillip Gourevitch

		He is the author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, an in-depth account of the Rwanda genocide. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a contributing editor to the Forward. In the aftermath of the genocide he spent over nine months in Rwanda trying to understand how this extraordinary crime had come to pass, how it was organized, how the Western powers had stood by and watched it happen, and how Rwandans are living with its legacy.

What is the most significant thing to understand about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda?
In Rwanda, in the course of 100 days in the spring and early summer of 1994, 800,000 people were put to death in the most unambiguous case of state-sponsored genocide in an attempt to exterminate a category of humanity, a people, since the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews of Europe.
... What distinguishes Rwanda is a clear, programmatic effort to eliminate everybody in the Tutsi minority group because they were Tutsis. The logic was to kill everybody. Not to allow anybody to get away. Not to allow anybody to continue. And the logic, as Rwandans call it, the genocidal logic, was very much akin to that of an ideology very similar to that of the Nazism vis-à-vis the Jews in Europe, which is all of them must be gotten rid of to purify in a sense the people. There's a utopian element in genocide that's perplexing. But it is an effort to create community in the strictest sense of "us versus them," by literally eliminating them and bonding all of us in complicity, in the course of that elimination. The idea was that all Hutus should participate in killing of Tutsis. And there have been cases of mass political murder, there have been cases of massacres and genocidal massacres, but never a country and a society so completely and totally convulsed by an effort at pure, unambiguous genocide since the end of World War II, since the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Who are Hutus and Tutsis? ... Can you summarize the background to this genocide--the civil war, the cease-fire and the arrival of U.N. peacekeepers?
Rwanda's population essentially consists of two groups, the Hutu majority (roughly 85%), the Tutsi minority (roughly 15%). There's a tiny minority of Pygmies as well. Until the late 19th century, which is to say, until European colonization, Tutsis (the minority) represented the aristocratic upper classes; Hutus were the peasant masses. The Europeans brought with them an idea of race science, by which they took this traditional structure and made it even more extreme and more polarized into an almost apartheid-like system. And ethnic identity cards were issued, and Tutsis were privileged for all things, and Hutus were really made into a very oppressed mass.
In the late '50s, early '60s, at the time that the rumblings towards independence were taking place across Africa, what happened in Rwanda for independence was a Hutu revolution, in the name of majority rule, that reversed the system. It remained an apartheid, polarized ethnic state, except the Hutu majority now was in charge. And you had a Hutu dictatorship running through the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, and into the mid-'90s. Throughout that period, there was systematic political violence used against Tutsi to maintain this Hutu power.
That violence generated a huge outflow since the late '60s of refugees into neighboring states, so that there were hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis living in exile, in one state or another, on the border of Rwanda, not naturalized in any other country, and wishing to come home. The government of Rwanda refused to re-admit those who'd fled.
And in 1990, a rebel army appeared, somewhat unexpectedly on the scene, took the Rwandan government by surprise, launching an incursion from the north, from Uganda. And a civil war broke out that was waged sporadically on and off through '90, '91, '92, and into '93. In the areas that it was waged, it was essentially a border war with a large chunk of border involved, but it didn't engulf the entire country.
In '93, a cease-fire was arranged: ethnic power sharing, political power sharing, multi-party state, integration of the armies, and the return of the refugees. And the key to all of this, to see that these two antagonistic parties would do what they pledged to do, was that the United Nations peacekeeping force would be brought in--in the fall of 1993 ...
... It was agreed by both sides that it would be deployed to the country and would preside over the peace implementation and transfer of power to this new sharing government. To the Hutu extremists who formed the entourage around the Hutu dictatorship, President Habyarimana, the threat of peace was even greater than the threat of war, because it amounted to a defeat. It meant that they couldn't have a total victory. They faced suddenly the threat of sharing power, which was the one thing on earth that they couldn't stand sharing. It was against that backdrop that the U.N. peacekeeping force began to arrive, and to attempt to preside over the implementation of a peace which the president's men had no intention of allowing him to implement.
What's the distinction to you between civil war and genocide?
In a civil war, you have essentially two combatant forces. Sometimes they are fighting against one another. Sometimes civilians get involved as militia men or so. In a genocide, there is no political objective ... the idea is to eliminate what is perceived as a blood line. It means anybody who carries that blood must be eliminated. So it doesn't matter if you're a baby. In a civil war, a baby is not a serious enemy element. Here, it is, because 60 years from now, that baby could be an adult. Grandmothers on their last legs are considered to be eliminated. Pregnant women. "You must be careful," the Rwandans who were committing the genocide said, "to disembowel them and make sure the fetus in their womb was dead." That's what genocide is about.
Tell me more about the differences.
In early April of 1994, much of the reporting said, "The civil war has been renewed in Rwanda." But a civil war involves two or more armies fighting one another--a rebel army and a government army. And it means that soldiers fight soldiers. The objective is to defeat the other party. Quite often, because these are wars that are civil wars, they involved civilian populations being attacked.
But a genocide is a completely different thing. You often ignore the enemy army to go after the people that you have decided to call the enemy. So you've decided that the Tutsis are the enemy. And that means that instead of going to the front to fight the enemy, you go to a Tutsi's home to kill his children and his old mother, because the idea is to eliminate a blood line.
And furthermore, when one talks about civil war, one's talking about the internal affairs of a state, how foreign policy people look at such a thing. When one talks about civil war, foreign policy people will say, "Well, that's the internal affair of a foreign state. We don't get involved in other people's civil wars." But we've pledged to get involved in genocides, of course. So when you call it a civil war, it's a way quite often of ignoring that, in fact, what's happening is a systematic attempt to eliminate this blood line, an act of genocide, and one concerted and organized to involve the entire population.
In this case, was it a breakdown of a civil war, a breakdown of a cease-fire?
There's no question that after Habyarimana's plane was shot down and the genocidal massacres began in Rwanda, the civil war was also renewed. It was an act of war against the people of Rwanda by the now acting government of Rwanda, the genocidal government. Immediately, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) returned to the field of battle and started its war again. And it was clear that that would happen.
So, of course, you had two things happening at once. You had a civil war and you had a genocide--much, I should say, as in World War II. You had World War II and you had the Holocaust, two separate events. And as we know, the two efforts often are odds with one another. So that trains that might supply the Eastern front during World War II were used instead to carry Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. And troops who might have been fighting the RPF to win a civil war were instead diverted to oversee the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda.
Who was the interahamwe?
The interahamwe was a militia group recruited in the name of civil self defense, the idea being that the population should be prepared to defend itself against the enemy. This was a way of popularizing the war, making the war an affair of you and me. Every Hutu must consider himself attacked by every Tutsi, rather than thinking that the state was being attacked by a rebel army. So the interahamwe was recruited. Primarily there was a lot of unemployment in Rwanda in the early '90s. These were sort of village youth who [had] gone to the cities looking for work, couldn't find work, were recruited to this kind of youth culture of militia movements. And the interahamwe literally means "those who attack together." And it was through the interahamwe that a large part of the younger Rwandan Hutu males were recruited into the genocidal logic, the genocidal propaganda and into the movement of killing.
Who was the informant who sent the January 11th fax warning of the genocide?
The informant who essentially laid out for the United Nations force commander what was being planned in Rwanda, that an extermination was being planned of Tutsis, was a man who had first been a member of President Habyarimana's security staff (in other words, he was a top ranking military security official) and had now been hired through the president's political party (which was essentially indistinguishable from the apparatus of the state) to run an interahamwe militia training program for the city of Kigali, training Hutu combatants to kill Tutsi. And he tells in his information very clearly, that he thinks that his men could kill 1,000 Tutsis in 20 minutes.
What was so remarkable about this fax?
What makes this fax utterly remarkable is that it describes a program planned in the highest echelons of the state, in the president's court, to eliminate a part of his population. It uses the word "extermination." The fax says that the informant believes it is for their extermination. If you go around the U.N. and you say, "What's extraordinary about that fax?" they say, "We got a lot of faxes." If you ask them how many faxes they believe they've [received], say, in the last 50 years, since genocide became defined as a crime, that talk about a plan in the head of state's chambers to exterminate his people, I think that they can't really count them. They can't think of any. The answer is, this is extraordinary. It's utterly extraordinary language: the precision, the detail, the confidence in the tone of the fax. That the U.N. field commander trusts his informant is unmistakable.
It's really important to remember, the fax is not headed "Request to Take Action." It's headed "Request for Protection for Informant." The force commander presumes that it was okay to take action. And he says, "Look, my mission, my rules are to go out there and to seize these illegal arms caches. (Kigali was supposed to be a weapons-free zone under the U.N. mandate.) I'm going to go out and seize these arms caches. I know they're there. I believe my informant. What I want to know is how to protect him. This man has come forward at tremendous risk to himself. (He believed that his informant [was] at risk.) Tell me how to do that." And the U.N. said, "We don't know how."
Another thing that makes this a truly extraordinary fax is that everything in it came true. Now, U.N. people, in their own defense, at peacekeeping headquarters (now the secretary-general's office) will tell you, "Well, hindsight isn't a fair way of looking at this." Well, but all judgment of history has to be made in hindsight. And the fact is, here was a force commander saying he trusted the man. The man told a lot. What the man told proved to be entirely true, which is what the force commander thought. His judgment was confirmed. And instead, the informant was lost, so we never got to hear more from him. Because once he was denied protection, good-bye.
It's astonishing in this fax, too, that there is a threat to the peacekeepers. The fax announces a plan to shoot Belgian peacekeepers. That should really be special in U.N. headquarters because as we know in this day and age, one of the greatest fears of anybody who thinks about engaging in peacekeeping forces is having body bags come back ... and here's an announcement that: Guess what? The people that are planning to exterminate part of their population are also planning to set the thing in motion by shooting the mostly European mainstay of the peacekeeping force. That alone should make it an extraordinary fax even if one doesn't care about the extermination of Rwandans.
How did the U.N. respond to this fax?
Essentially, the response of the peacekeeping headquarters in New York at the U.N. headquarters was to treat this fax as a routine bureaucratic matter. It set off no special alarm bells that rang loudly. It was not disseminated. One sometimes can imagine if that fax appeared on the front page of all the world's major newspapers, on the TV and so forth. In other words, a lot of influence could have been exerted by leaking this fax and drawing attention to this crisis. No. It was treated as a routine bureaucratic matter. And the idea was: Let's just stick with the rules. We're not obliged to do anything in response to such information. What our mandate rules (and the U.N. loves to fall back on mandate rules) are, we should tell the president that there's a cease-fire violation been reported. And so the U.N. commanders were instructed to go to the president and tell him that they had this information about illegal arms caches and about rumors of a program to commit massacres, and to say, "Gee, this is against the rules of the cease-fire that we're here to enforce."
The absurdity of this is that essentially what they were doing is, they were being charged to go to the president and tell him that he had a leak in his own court, where the planning of a genocide was taking place, and to say, "By the way, we've been tipped off." Well, that would make the informant's position even more precarious than ever before. It would alert the president rather than punish him. It would just tell him, "Be careful." It's a little bit like the way we would say to Saddam, "We're coming to inspect. You get two weeks to move your stuff." And so the president was alerted to this ...
Why did they tell them not to go after the gun caches, and to tell the president ...
The interahamwe was a militia being run by the president's political party. It was being run by his cronies, by his business partners, by his colonels and generals. He was not always at the very command top of it, but he was totally involved in the circle of people who were planning these massacres, and who were plotting to scrap the peace process and seize power through massacres and through a war against the Tutsis rather than a war against the real military enemy.
So here's this president. And what does U.N. headquarters tell its commanders to do? Go tell him that we've been tipped off about this. Now, on one level I suppose the argument is: That's how these missions work. They treat a government as a government until it's overthrown. That's who they have to deal with. They deal in diplomatic terms. On the other hand, what it really constitutes is telling somebody who is plotting a massive crime against humanity that he should be more careful; he should watch his flank; he's got a leak in his operation. That's really what the information would compute as, in President Habyarimana's head. Make life precarious for the informant, guarantee that no more information will come to the U.N. through those channels ...
What happened to the president's plane, and what did that spark?
Throughout the so-called peace implementation period, President Habyarimana was under tremendous pressure from the extremists not to implement the peace process. He dragged his feet. He resisted. He did everything within his power to avoid it. On early April of 1994, he was called by regional presidents to various meetings. "Come on, you've got to get with the program and implement this peace deal. It's causing problems." He was flying back on April 6, 1994, from these meetings. He flies into Kigali, and as his plane descends towards the airport, it's hit by one or two surface-to-air missiles, bursts into flames, and crashes (almost mythically) into his own backyard of his palace.
Now, immediately the Hutu power extremist radio, starts blaming the rebels (the Rwandese Patriotic Front) for this. There has since been endless speculation about who did what. What's most clear is that the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that it was actually the extremists in the president's own entourage, who had often predicted that if he didn't comply with them and complied instead with the peace deal, he would be meeting his maker. They staged a coup within half an hour. Essentially, the government now became a government of unabashed Hutu extremists. It became a military coup, which installed a new sort of puppet government. And within the course of that night (the night of April 6th), the program of massacres that had been planned began to get implemented, first killing political oppositionists rather than singling out Tutsis by ethnicity. It was really focusing on those people who might cause the most political trouble. And members of the presidential guard were recruited and sent forth with lists as assassins. Massacres began to take place. And essentially what you saw is, the propaganda that went forth was, "They, the Tutsis, the rebels, have killed our president." So he was sacrificed, almost. It was the rhetoric of "Our beloved president was killed by them," when in fact everything indicates that they either killed him or certainly exploited his death within moments.
At that point, what role did national radio play?
Almost immediately after the peace deal was signed in August of 1993, and the U.N. force was commissioned, many of the people around the president and in the Hutu power leadership established a second radio station. Up until then, Rwanda had had one radio station, Radio Rwanda. Now they established a second major radio station with a powerful signal, called RTLM (Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines). And this became the genocidal radio. It was a radio dedicated entirely to entertainment and genocidal propaganda. And it was highly entertaining. It had pop music. It was very much in keeping with the kind of youth movement spirit of the militia movement. And people loved this radio station. It was very popular. And it mounted this increasingly virulent, exclusionary and exterminatory rhetoric in the period during the so-called peace implementation. Following the president's death, it became almost Genocide Central. It was through there that people were instructed at times, "Go out there and kill. You must do your work. People are needed over in this commune." Sometimes they actually had disc jockeys who would say, "So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street." And they would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was apparently quite dramatic. And it was a rallying tool that was used in a tremendous way to mobilize the population.
... To understand how powerful radio was, or how powerful the message was, it's interesting to contrast [to] neighboring Burundi, [which] has the same ethnic mix as Rwanda. The president of Burundi was a passenger on President Habyarimana's plane, and was also killed on the night of April 6th. But in that country, the U.N. leaders there helped organize the political leaders to plead on the radio for calm. So a message of calm was sent out, and people responded to that. Here, a message to lather up the population to kill was sent out, and the people responded to that.
What happened to the Belgian soldiers, and why? Was it intentional?
Throughout the period that UNAMIR had been in the country, the Hutu power propagandists (both on radio but especially in print, where it was easier for them to carry on because you had to read Rwandan) were saying, "You know, this U.N. force is in the way if trouble begins. If we want to go about our business, what are we going to do about this U.N. force?" And they'd been looking around, and they said, "You know, these U.N. blue helmets, they don't seem to have a lot of fighting strength. They tend to run away when the fighting begins." This was clearly declared in a number of articles that one can trace. And one of the things that had been also said in the famous fax of January 11th that was sent to peacekeeping headquarters is: When the president is attacked, so too we will attack a bunch of Belgian blue helmets who make up the mainstay of the U.N. contingent, and with the aim of forcing the Belgians, by killing some of them, to be afraid and turn tail and run away. And the whole force will then be withdrawn. It was clearly a plan.
Well, on the morning of April 7, 1994, after the assassination of President Habyarimana, as death squads and assassin groups were fanning out through the capital, hunting political oppositionists, they came to the prime minister's house. She was one of the main oppositionists that they were after. While they were there, ten Belgian blue helmets arrived to say, "Hey, what's going on," and to offer protection. Well, not only did they fail to protect her, but they were then taken captive by the military of the new genocidal government. They were taken back to a military base, and in the course of several hours they were tortured, murdered and mutilated. It was a shocking event. And as soon as they were released, within the week, sure enough, as the assassins had planned, the Belgians lost their appetite for this mission, and the force began to crumble.
What were the Hutus' intention by killing the blue helmets?
Remember that at the end of 1993 in Somalia, 18 American Rangers on a peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu had been killed, and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, televised around the world. And the Clinton administration, which had come into office talking about a brave new era of peacekeeping and global intervention and policing, lost its appetite for peacekeeping very fast.
Well, the Rwandans who were planning a genocide, the Hutu extremists around the president, studied this sort of event very closely. They said, "Look, they come in here telling us what to do, these peacekeepers. They come in here with a good line of talk, but they don't have the strength to fight, and they can't stand body bags." They studied this. It was in their newspapers. It was in their plans. And they said, "If we kill some of them, they'll go away." That was in the fax that was sent to U.N. headquarters. It was predicted that they were planning to kill some Belgians. And sure enough, on the morning after the president's assassination, they killed these blue helmets. And it's clear from the script that they wrote in advance that what they wanted (the Hutu power leaders whose military killed these blue helmets) was to scare away the U.N. mission on the brink of the genocide.
What was the Clinton's administration's policy? How was it implemented through Madeline Albright?
Pretty much as soon as the ten Belgian blue helmets had been killed, the debate became: Should we beef up the U.N. force, or should we cut it back? The Clinton administration--and one should always remember that in the United Nations Security Council, the United States is essentially the 800-pound gorilla that sits where it wants and can bend others to its will. It's the great power. The Clinton administration's policy was, "Let's withdraw altogether. Let's get out of Rwanda. Leave it to its fate." The United States ambassador to the United Nations at that time was then Madeline Albright. And it was she who was in the wretched position of having to represent this position to the Security Council, and who did so very effectively.
Iqbal Riza [U.N.] said, "Certainly in the first few days, neither the people on the ground or we here knew that this was a planned genocide. We knew that fighting had resumed, and we all viewed it as a breakdown of the cease-fire." How would you respond to that? What did they know at U.N.?
It's clear that by the time that President Habyarimana was assassinated, there was plenty of information floating around U.N. headquarters to the effect that his entourage, the people around him, were eager to commit massacres against the Tutsis. There had been massacres--practice massacres, one could call them--throughout the '90s. They had continued. There were a lot of political assassinations in the months of early 1994. There was a lot of trouble. One had to effectively tune that out. One had to willfully ignore a lot of information in order to think that when the president's plane was shot down and violence returned to Kigali, that that violence was simply a resumption of the same old civil war, rather than a new order of political massacres. If nothing else, the purges on the first night and the first morning (during which, of course, the Belgians were killed), were of a thoroughness and extremity that had not been seen before. And those were not enemy forces.
So it's extraordinary at the least, that those who were charged with maintaining the Rwanda mission at the U.N. can now plead that they didn't recognize what was going on. Certainly, the wish that it was only a cease-fire violation, rather than the wish to see clearly how starkly it was in fact the fulfillment of all the predictions of extermination. It was that wish not to notice, I think, that prevailed.
They didn't put two and two together?
Riza basically told me when I spoke to him that, "Look, after the debacle of peacekeeping for Americans in Somalia, we here at peacekeeping headquarters knew that there was no major appetite to get involved in such missions," particularly ... in Africa. That was the climate. When I said, "Well, but did you share the information? Did you push it? Did you aggressively pursue this," the attitude was, "Well, we knew that they didn't want to do it." So there was almost an attitude of collapse. There was an attitude of "Why bother?" There was not a very aggressive point of view there ... it's essentially the plea that we didn't realize it was a genocide; therefore, we didn't respond to it as one. It's pretty appalling that it wasn't recognized.
One of the things that's so astonishing when one comes to this now and looks at this with any care, is how profoundly it was scripted ... when I say "profoundly," I mean how thoroughly it was scripted, how thoroughly it was announced, how thoroughly it was a genocide foretold, how thoroughly the signs were on the surface. They were on the radio. They were in the newspapers. You could buy them at any street corner. You could hear them at any rally. You didn't have to go looking. This was not a top secret program that was coming forward. It was something that was really quite conspicuously announced.
Characterize the speed, the brutality and the scope of what was happening.
You can't overstate how rapidly this unfolded. All at once, everywhere in Rwanda, there was a vast uprising or spontaneous outburst of killing. It was plotted. It was planned. It moved. You can actually see how it radiated out from Kigali through careful manipulation and planning.
And at the same time, it did so very rapidly. We're talking about 800,000 people murdered in the course of 100 days. That's 8,000 murders a day. I find that on average that's five murders a minute. The speed and the graphic brutality, the fact that this was conducted largely with machetes ... people were battered to death, were hacked to death, were stabbed to death, hand to hand, across the country, on this kind of industrial scale. I think that the extraordinary horror of that, and the immensity and speed of this violence, did to some extent short-circuit responses. On the other hand, one might have said that the immense speed and graphic horror would have created a sense of urgency. Instead, it seems to have created a sense of shutdown.
The expatriate rescue: What happened?
When this started, of course, there were embassies in Rwanda. There were some aid missions still there. In early 1994, Peace Corps was beginning to get started again in Rwanda. You had French, Belgian and European nuns and missionaries and so forth, spread out throughout the land. There were a number of white Westerners, American or European people living in Rwanda in various professional and private capacities. The immediate response of the world was, "We will, of course, intervene to evacuate our nationals." This is standard procedure. And so you had a rather massive influx of commando forces from Europe and also some Americans, flying into the airport, fanning out in jeeps and so forth to rescue missionaries, priests, doctors, aid workers, diplomats, and their children, and to take them out of the country--which created some really terrible moments where people were forced to leave behind those Rwandans who worked for them. Didn't matter if you were the loyal, steadiest employee of the American embassy in Kigali. If you were a Rwandan, see you later. And so the European-American world air-lifted itself out and left Rwanda again to its fate.
Anyidoho, who was the Ghanaian commander on the ground, said, "We had enough troops ... we just missed a fleeting opportunity." What was missed? What opportunity was there when these troops were on the ground?
You look at all those troops going in to get the foreigners out, and you can't help thinking, well, that's a lot of troops, if they wished to do something. These are commandos. These are pretty crack troops. These are guys who are prepared to go in there and do what it takes to extract one deputy at an embassy. Couldn't they have done a lot?
It's clear that throughout the Rwandan story and throughout basically any story of non-intervention around the world, what's lacking isn't the military wherewithal. It's extraordinary, the military capacities of America and its European allies. What's lacking is any sense of interest in so doing. And Rwanda lay outside the strategic interests of America. Part of what makes Rwanda extraordinarily a case study almost in the dramatic question of, "When do we and when don't we choose to act," is that we chose not to. One can't argue that there was geo-strategic, economic, or other political interests to motivate us. So this is almost like a petri dish case. And America just didn't want to. It's really a story of not wanting. You hear the phrase "political will." Simply translated: I don't want to.
Explain the scene when the Security Council vote is taken, and Rwanda is one of the member states, and everybody seems deferential to each other. What's wrong?
Diplomacy is a cold business. Diplomats will be polite to each other at all costs. Remember, people were very cordial to Hitler. People had been very cordial to Stalin ... Remember that at the United Nations throughout the late 1970s and all of the 1980s, the United States helped Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge maintain Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. This was Cold War politics. They didn't want the Vietnamese occupiers of Cambodia to be there. We were polite to them. They'd just killed two million of their people. They'd been our enemy 20 years before.
So here, in a complete fluke, in 1994, little Rwanda gets one of these rotating seats on the Security Council, and the Rwandan genocidal government has a representative on the Security Council as the world sits down to debate its fate. You have France, the main patron of the Rwandese government, which also exercises power on the Security Council with some of its other partner states. Djibouti happened to be on the Security Council. And Djibouti is also a complete part of the neo-colonial French sphere of influence. So you have everybody being very polite to one another. Now, people don't say, "Your government's committing genocide, and you shut up and sit down now." No. Everybody gets a vote, and they go about this all very politely, as if it were a routine matter, to some extent. Perhaps that's what keeps the U.N. going, but it's also what makes the U.N. singularly an ineffective place to take urgent action.
I think, when we talk about intervention, it's worth remembering that if the United States wants to intervene somewhere, if the United States wants to go bomb Baghdad, we do so ... like that, without asking permission all over the place at the U.N. When we want to build a coalition, we go to the U.N. The U.N. also is where people go when they want a cover for inaction. "We'll all go there and we'll all discuss it" means, "It's not very important to any of us."
What could or should the world do, even without military intervention?
There are two basic choices that confront the world, the international community, or the world powers confronted with such a situation as one had in Rwanda. Either you intervene aggressively, or you don't.
Now, within the category of "you don't," which was the one that was chosen, that doesn't mean that there's nothing else that can be done. For one thing, if you declare very clearly that you aren't going to, in advance, you don't create the false promise of protection that was created in Rwanda. Many Rwandans have told me that they made their plans, as they saw the situation worsening in early 1994, they decided to stay and take their chances in Rwanda because they also saw these blue helmets. So that's the first step is, you don't make false promises of protection if you're not really going to see them through.
The second thing is, once you've decided not to intervene, there's still a lot of pressure that can be exerted. For instance, you can put a lot of diplomatic pressure, economic pressure. You can delegitimize the government that is committing these massacres. You can make it very clear that you see it as what it is, and that you will do everything within your power to decommission these people. Rwanda maintained an embassy in Washington throughout the genocide. We didn't threaten to shut that embassy down until the genocide was shut down. There's a lot of pressure. One says, "No aid. You're no longer a legitimate government. We believe the reports that we are hearing, that you are a government that is criminal." So a lot of effort could be made beyond direct military action, to at least destabilize that government's sense of its surety as a member of the international community. But instead, everything was done to continue to embrace it as a member.
Even if the world decided not to intervene militarily, it still has options.
It's pretty clear that nothing short of the use of force would stop the tremendous force that was mobilized to commit the Rwandan genocide. And yet, even after the international community had decided (the Western powers) not to intervene and use that force, that didn't mean that they were without further options for putting pressure on the government: economic pressure, diplomatic pressure, moral pressure, to speak out and to be quite active in a way that wasn't done either. There wasn't a sense of really trying to exclude the government of Rwanda that was responsible for mobilizing this genocide from the community of nations. Instead, it was [continually] included.
From the Clinton administration's standpoint and the State Department briefings, what was the dilemma they faced in not calling this a genocide?
The Genocide Convention basically stood as the one document, the international law about genocide. And what it said was, if there's a genocide, the people who have agreed to this convention (which is the United States included) have to act to stop genocide when it's happening. In other words, if it's a genocide, you must act. It was a straight equation. The Clinton administration didn't want to act, which meant that it couldn't call it a genocide, because if it acknowledged that it was a genocide, it's clear from its own statements that its reading was: It had to do something. And eventually what happened was, the Clinton administration came up with a new reading of the Genocide Convention, which basically said, "Well, it doesn't oblige us to act. It permits us to act. It creates a framework in which we can act," which is nonsense, of course. Who needs permission to act? You don't need an international law about genocide to say, "It's okay to try to stop this." You have one that says, "No, we pledge to try to stop this." So they came up with this spin that basically spayed the convention, spayed the pledge. That's what it was about.
Characterize the political calculations made by the Clinton administration at the time.
Well, if you think about the political calculus of that moment from the White House's point of view. If they completely did the wrong thing in Rwanda, was there ever going to be a bill to pay for it, politically? Probably not. I think that they recognized that it was unlikely to cost them politically. And even if it would cost them morally, there would be few people around tabulating that cost and reminding them ... they basically figured it wouldn't stick. It didn't matter.
What would be the cost at home?
After Somalia, it's really clear that the Clinton administration was terrified of body bags. What they didn't want was dead American troops on television, in an intervention whose strategic necessity, whose essence to the national security was not obvious. In other words, what they were saying is: "Yeah, there may be a Genocide Convention, but that's not really what we're responding to. That's not what drives us. We have a downside politically, which is the risk of getting drawn into something where we don't even know what we're doing there." ... After Somalia, the Clinton administration's attitude towards international peacekeeping, international interventions, even in much more strategically vital areas of concern (like, say, Central Europe, Bosnia), was strictly "head in the sand" ... The Genocide Convention was not what was motivating [them]. The Genocide Convention was merely a rhetorical problem for them.
It feels like there was a diplomatic equivalent of the Powell doctrine going on: Only go into a situation where you know you can win. Don't take risks, regardless of moral obligation.
Think about it. April 1993, President Clinton standing in front of the Holocaust Museum saying, "This should be insurance against any insanity that lurks ahead." He appears to be making a pledge that we will not stand for such crimes against humanity, such crimes of genocide, to take place on the face of this earth ... at the very least, he seems to be saying that.
A year later, he actually is saying, "We must learn when it's time to say, no." That was the response to Rwanda. Clearly, the pledge to prevent genocide was hollow. What mattered, at this point, was the obvious political calculus of: We don't want to get involved. We don't want to lose people. We don't know what we're going to go in there for--never mind the moral imperative, never mind the shame of humanity, never mind a sense of common humanity. We have political calculations to make. We're not going to risk any lives on that one ... not our problem.
Presidential Directive 25: How did it come to be? Was it in response to Somalia?
Yes ... after the Somalia debacle, the White House had actually commissioned a policy review. And a document was produced called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which was basically a checklist: These are the things that we should review when we consider intervention. If we encounter any of these factors (and it was a very, very long list of possible political factors), we should not intervene. So it was really a checklist of reasons not to intervene, is essentially what it boiled down to.
This document was sort of in its final draft forms as the Rwandan slaughter began. And it was circulating. People at the U.N. say that Madeline Albright was carrying it around there. It was certainly circulating on Capitol Hill. It was circulating out of the White House. It was the Clinton administration document. And what you hear about that is, the most striking thing in it is that it says, "Not only should we decide when we don't want to intervene, but when we don't, we should exert what pressure we can on others also not to intervene." In other words, "We can't be seen to be sitting it out." This, then, is the closest thing we have to a highly articulated policy position, defining the responses that we saw in the course of Rwanda.
Why on May 17th did the Security Council decide to increase the U.N. force?
By May 17th, it was no longer possible to pretend that there wasn't a genocide taking place in Rwanda. There was no getting around it. What was happening with immense speed, on an immense scale, was the slaughter of the Tutsi population of Rwanda, by then, by the hundreds of thousands. It was pretty well understood that at least half a million people had been killed by then. At that point, people began to realize, "We're never going to be able to defend having withdrawn. Maybe we ought to think about going back in. We can't bring back the 500,000 or more dead, but we can at least perhaps attempt to bring an end to this slaughter, and not allow this genocide to be completed." I think it was genuine shame that drove the decision to revisit this.
And shame, of course, tends to have an element behind it, usually in political terms of public pressure. There was press reporting. There were people clucking their tongues in front of their television sets and their radio sets. There were editorials. There were congressmen who were beginning to scratch their heads and say, "What's happening? How are we allowing this to go on?" There was an increasing sense around the world that this would not stand. Why aren't we there?
How did the genocide end?
The genocide was brought to a halt by Rwandans, by the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front. The world left Rwanda to its genocide. Rwandans committed it, and other Rwandans stopped it. And when the RPF ultimately swept across Rwanda, took control of Kigali, and established a new government in mid-July, the genocidal regime (its military and its militias) took with it large parts of the population who were following it, and led them over the border into exile. As early as late April, 250,000 went over the border into Tanzania. In July, one saw one million and a half going over the border into the Zaire (now the Congo). These were the most rapid mass exoduses in modern history. And essentially what you saw was the establishment of these massive U.N. camps to accommodate these people just across the borders from Rwanda.
But beneath the U.N. flag, what happened was that you really had a rump Rwandan state run by the genocidal military and political apparatus, which had left intact, gone into exile, taken its troops with it, and continued to maintain its claim on political life in Rwanda.
Who was in these camps?
The population in these camps was an incredible mix of innocents and killers. People who were civilians didn't automatically mean that you weren't a killer. Then of course you had the militias, who had blood all over their hands, most of them. And then you had the military. And then you had the political leadership. You had whole villages and civil administrations reproducing themselves. And the camps really replicated the structure of the genocidal state, as well as its composition. So you really had a terrifying reality in these camps.
How did the West respond to the setting up of these camps?
People saw a mass refugee exodus. Suddenly you could get this on TV. They were fleeing across the borders. There was no longer mass killing. It was no longer entirely dangerous. And you had this sense, "Wait. We've been told there was a genocide, and now we're seeing a mass outflow of refugees. Genocide plus refugees must equal refugees from genocide." And one's heart was wrenched.
The reality, of course, was that these were the perpetrators of the genocide and those whom they had cajoled, almost sometimes as hostages, into following them into exile; and that what was being established was this rump genocidal state. What was being established was a replication of the Hutu power regime in camps sponsored by the U.N. And the world poured in money. It poured in support. It poured in humanitarian aid. The world basically completely coddled these camps, presided over by the killers.
What is the Western response to the bodies flowing down river?
It became harder and harder for the Clinton administration to maintain its position (a) that this wasn't a genocide, and (b) that the right thing to do was nothing, as images began to appear. There were relatively few because it wasn't a very safe place to operate. But then you had the bodies floating down the rivers.
I remember, I was at the Holocaust Museum in early May of 1995. Happened to be in Washington, visiting the museum. And I bought a local paper, and on the cover was a photograph of these bodies swirling in the river and it said they were victims of the genocide in Rwanda. The word was used there. And meanwhile I'm seeing museum workers going to work with these lapel buttons on that say, "Remember, and never again."
Eventually, the embarrassment of the administration was such that they said, "Well, we are doing something about what's going on in Rwanda." And they announced that they were involved in an international health initiative in Uganda, all the way downstream, where the bodies were flowing. They had started a health initiative to clean the bodies up off the beach. That's what we did.
Why was it easier to respond to the camps than to the genocide itself?
The camps offered an image of Africa and of African conflict that I think is more suitable to the way the administration wanted to see these things, which is suddenly we could say it's a humanitarian crisis. A genocide is a political crime. A civil war is a political conflict. It's actually, there are things being fought over. In a genocide, you actually have a serious crime being committed before you. Here you have a humanitarian crisis, and you can do humanitarian aid and humanitarian intervention, all of which sounds benign. It's non-military. It sounds only like you are helping to save these poor people from themselves. That's essentially what it sounds like. And that appealed tremendously. You could also say, "Look, we're not doing nothing." You can make a gesture of concern without undertaking much risk.
Describe the season of apologies: Annan, Albright, Clinton going to Africa to apologize. What's that about?
It was pretty striking in early '97, when Madeline Albright, now Secretary of State, visited Africa and one of the centerpieces of it--to be issuing what amounted to an apology for the United States' inaction and failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide appropriately, failure to use the word "genocide" to describe what was happening, and then to act accordingly. And also to apologize and to say that it was wrong to have supported humanitarian aid camps that served as bases for the perpetrators, the killers of genocide. And she visited Kigali at that time, and set the tone for the trip that Clinton then took several months later, where he also went to Kigali and issued a real breast-beating apology.
And I think it's easy to say, "Well, that's nice and fine. Sorry about your million dead, but we didn't mean it. We see that we were wrong now." It's easy to basically take a somewhat cynical tone about the whole apology. I think that it was crucial at that point. What's striking are two things. The Clinton administration, at that point, was under no pressure about Rwanda. Nobody was jumping up and down and saying, "This is a terrible shame. You must rectify this blot." It was an initiative they took. It was an initiative that I think was somewhat heartfelt, because I think they recognized that it was a genuine shame on their record. What they did is, they set the record straight. Rwanda is a land where history is still contested. Rwanda is a place with a question of what really happened. Was it a genocide or wasn't it? If the world didn't call it a genocide, that essentially is an advantage for those who committed the crime. So they set the record straight. And in that, in acknowledging their own failure, there was a value.
On the other hand, they promised greater vigilance in the future. President Clinton basically said, "We won't allow such things to happen again. We must never allow such things to happen again, because the more we allow such things to happen again, the more likely they are to happen." I don't think that one can possibly look at that and feel more secure. That promise rings terribly hollow, because the action of not acting when it mattered in 1994, essentially makes those words moot until proper action is taken when it's needed.
Did any of them take personal responsibility?
None of these apologies is particularly personal. None of it is "I was on the watch and I failed." And they tend to say, "We, the world, failed. We, the international community, failed." And I think really what it's a reminder of is that there is no sense of accountability, and through that then, of responsibility that adheres to the so-called international community, or international responses, anyway. Yes, we could have done more. We should have done better. It's a shame, what we didn't do.
What did you think when you heard the apologies?
When I heard the apologies, what I was struck by is how generously Rwandan survivors of the genocide received them. And it made it hard to be as cynical as, say, a reporter on the White House beat might be, because I knew these people, after being in Rwanda a lot. And what I realized was how desperate they were for the acknowledgment of their ordeal by the very people who had ignored it, refused to acknowledge it, and essentially made it nonexistent while it was taking place; and that it was awfully late and awfully light or easy at this time to do it. And yet it mattered tremendously, because life goes on. And having one's reality acknowledged, it's never too late.
What does it mean for people to applaud Clinton for simply saying the word "genocide?"
Rwandans recognize that the genocide was the product of a regime of lies, a regime that had presided over the country for 30 years, and in every way had been politically and morally dishonest, deceptive, and false. And that the very fabric of Rwandan reality had been twisted, as one sees in totalitarian orders so often, into a world where things were not called by their proper names. And as a result, Rwandan genocide survivors and Rwandans after the genocide have been really remarkably outspoken in describing their own experience, and in reasserting their history against this regime of lies. To have that acknowledged, to have the president of the most powerful country on earth visit their country and say to them, "At the time, we too participated in the lie that what was happening, wasn't happening; and at least now we will acknowledge that it happened," it gives them a more coherent universe to go forward in.
What did it all mean in the end?
Shortly after World War II, Primo Levi (the great writer who had been in Auschwitz) wrote his book about being in Auschwitz and described how, while they were there, the people in Auschwitz often said, "At least the one thing we can say is, this will never happen to us again." In the late '80s, he wrote an essay in which he said, "The one thing was certain, is that it can happen again, anywhere." I think Rwanda proved him terribly right. And seeing those two quotes next to each other, from the same man, and being reminded how in a sense the wish never to have to be confronted again by such an atrocity and such a crime, that followed the Holocaust, should in fact come at century's end to bring us to a place where it seems increasingly familiar, increasingly within the realm of possibility, and that the pledges to act against it seem increasingly to have been abandoned, I think it really leaves us in a state of great uncertainty. And it calls into question how true our wishes are about a genuinely binding sense of common humanity.
How do you understand it was possible that it happened?
When you go deep into the history of Rwanda, past and present, and you really explore how the society functioned and what was at stake for people, you can begin to understand the mechanisms by which the genocidal state manipulated so much of the population and mobilized it to become murderers. And yet ultimately you can add all those factors up, and it doesn't explain something essential. There's a mystery here that people did this. At the same time, I would go further and I would say: But it happens. We keep seeing that it happens. People will be manipulable in this way. Political power will find ways to harness enough wickedness that we will see these kinds of mass slaughters. We've seen them too often now to pretend that they are anomalous.
How could it have happened? On a certain level, I've always approached the question, how could it have happened, by putting it a little aside and saying: It did. It's the fact from which we begin. It's the fact which makes us look into it. We'll never fully get it unless we ourselves ... accept a genocidal mentality. You can look at its [mechanisms]. You can study it. But why so many people chose to kill their neighbors? It was an utterly gratuitous crime.
What does the Rwandan genocide say to the promise of the Genocide Convention?
Encoded in the Genocide Convention was essentially a promise to the world that the interests of humanity were so great that they should override smaller ideas of national interest, and create an idea of international human community so powerful that one could count on an international response to stop genocide, should it ever begin. That's simply no longer the case. That's been rubbed out. The Clinton administration policy during the Rwandan genocide and since has been to essentially delete the prevention clause, the spirit of action to stop genocide, from the promise that we had after the war. That's a big change. I think that's a very big change. I think it leaves us all less safe.
Relate the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Is Rwanda the most clear-cut example since WWII?
Since World War II, since the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, Rwanda is the most clear cut, most unambiguous, by the law, definition case of genocide. Genocide by intent, and genocide by reality. What was intended was a genocide. What was achieved was a genocide. ...
What is motivating U.S. policy?
We talk about Rwanda as a failure of US policy: a failure to intervene, a failure to recognize what was going on, and a failure to take action to stop genocide. But if you look at the Clinton administration's approach to it throughout the entire period, what you really see is that it was actually a success of a policy not to intervene. It wasn't a failure to act. The decision was not to act. And at that, we succeeded greatly. It may sound cynical. It may sound sarcastic to say that. But it actually is important to understand this, because not acting was the policy. It wasn't a inadvertent thing. We didn't want to. We did what we didn't want to do. And we then end up in a world where it's clear that what matters is not some consistent policy, "Oh yes, faced with genocide, we will take action," but, "Oh no, we are in a position to say we don't want to, and to refuse." And that's how policy is going to be made.
Is there a lesson or something to be said about going from the promise of the Genocide Convention to the pragmatism of our policy in Rwanda?
In December of 1998, we had the 50th anniversary of the Genocide Convention. And there were a lot of commemorative events, anniversary events that basically talked about: Where does it stand now? It didn't seem to me that it was really an occasion for a 50th birthday party. It seemed to me more of an occasion for an obituary and a wake, because the lesson the Rwanda leaves us with is that at least the part of the Genocide Convention that seemed to promise that the world was going to put its common humanity above all, and stand at least for stopping genocide when an unambiguous case of it appeared, had proven-- it was ... stricken from the document. It was stricken from the record. It was stricken from the international code. And that what we're left with is the idea of "never again." It may be a true wish, but it's a false promise.

Recording the Images of the Genocide
A personal account by Adam Scotti

There are around 7 mass graves dug at the memorial hosting the majority of the 50,000 people. The government believes by putting the bodies and bones on display reminds people of the atrocities that were committed. Furthermore, their display enables no one to claim it never happened. The bodies are covered in lyme to ensure that they do not deteriorate any further, or at least not as quickly.

To the best of my recollection, this was taken in the second or third room into which we entered. When I first asked the guide if it were ok to take photos, he actually encouraged it saying " take your photos, but I want you to show them, even if just your friends. People need to know what happened and that this is real". I was really uneasy taking photos at first, kneeling down to get certain shots or angles, I came very close to some of these bodies, too close for comfort. After the first couple of rooms, I kept on reminding myself what the guide had told us. Doing so enabled me to keep on shooting without actually registering what I was doing. On the drive home to Kigali, the car was eerily silent. It took another few days to actually allow everything we had seen sink in.

It is weird thinking that some rooms are more disturbing than others considering on first thought, it is all revolting. The rooms which can be distinguished from the others and therefore easily remembered are the rooms with only children "on display". Our technical "rules of war" set aside those who are not involved in the fighting, more specifically children for various reasons. What blows you away is the ability for these killers to painlessly kill children in front of their parents who were friends or neighbors to the killer.

I have another shot from the memorial which has more details on the memorial itself, so if you are interested or even if you are not, check it out. After all, as I was told "it is our responsibility as humans to help those in need".

Rwanda: Can Art Bring Peace?
20 July 2007
Will Bartholomew
Washington, D.C.
Simon Bikindi is currently standing trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), facing charges for war crimes committed during the country's 1994 genocide. Bikindi is a former Rwandan pop musician whose anti-Tutsi songs were regularly broadcast over the notorious Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines.
But if music can be used to incite genocide, it can also be used to create peace and a climate of reconciliation. Thirty students, teachers, and artists will head to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, this week as part of a joint program run by the School of Theater at the California Institute for the Arts in the United States and the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center in Rwanda.
Erik Ehn, dean of the School of Theater and co-founder of the program, believes that art has a very large part to play in Rwanda's reconciliation efforts. "Art is the way we create, organize, and disseminate ideas of who we are," he said. "Art can be used for a very negative purpose as it was during the genocide with Simon Bikindi. Yet in the same way art can be used to redefine us, or to re-own history."
Ehn has partnered with Jean-Pierre Karegeye of the center in Kigali to create the two-week program, which is now entering its third year. The program's goal, said Ehn, is to "study the genocide and to look at the ways the performing arts can contribute to the process of recovery."
The 30 participants in this year's program will visit genocide sites, meet with victims and perpetrators, listen to lectures by government officials and academics and hold workshops with Rwandan artists. The American participants will not only learn about the genocide so that they can better represent it in their art, but also will help Rwandan artists to find their own voice and express their ideas about the genocide and its aftermath.
"Reciprocity is a really important part of this," Leslie Tamaribuchi said, associate dean at the School of Theater at CalArts.
Tamaribuchi, also a participant in the program, believes that fostering the artistic expression of Rwandans is an important goal of the program. "The narrative of the genocide is a narrative that was propagated in a very monolithic way, and these cultural expressions that are growing up in the aftermath are very tender, diverse, and fragile."
Tamaribuchi has already seen some of the program's benefits. Last summer, a genocide survivor wrote a play based on her experience during the program. "She as a survivor hadn't articulated her experience in any form really before and here was a creative expression of her experience during the genocide that she not only managed to craft, but she also released it back to the community of survivors," she said.
Some U.S.-based participants who went on last year's trip were also able to raise funds to buy a group of Rwandan filmmakers a large inflatable screen. They use the screen to show their movies in villages across the Rwandan countryside.
But for Tamaribuchi, working together is the most important aspect of the program."What is it to trust each other enough to work together, and what does that mean especially in Rwanda, especially post genocide?"

Post Script: 2 December 2008
PARIS — A well-known Rwandan musician, Simon Bikindi, has been convicted of incitement to genocide and sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in the hate campaign against Tutsi that led to the 1994 genocide.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found Mr. Bikindi guilty of using a public-address system along roads in Rwanda in June 1994 to call on Hutu to rise up and exterminate the Tutsi.
He was acquitted of five other related charges.
The panel of judges said some of Mr. Bikindi’s songs had played a role in a propaganda campaign to promote contempt for the Tutsi population, and to incite Hutu to attack and kill Tutsi. But they said prosecutors had not proved that Mr. Bikindi’s music could be linked directly to any specific attacks or killings.
Mr. Bikindi, 54, is the first entertainer to be found guilty of a genocide-related charge.



Rwanda Questions
Page 1 (The Berlin Conference and the Division of Africa) (pink)

1. What nations colonized Africa?
2. Why did they colonize Africa? What were they hoping to achieve?
3. What was the Berlin Conference?
4. What were the long lasting effects of the Berlin Conference?
5. Who controlled the area that would become Rwanda? What happened to these colonizers?

Page 2 (Rwanda) (pink)

1. Where is Rwanda located in Africa?
2. What is significant about its population?
3. How do most of its people live?
4. What is the country like (geography)?
5. What two ethnic groups live in Rwanda?
6. Who is in the majority and who is in the minority?

Page 3-5 (What are the Differences between the Hutus and the Tutsis?) (blue)

1. Who did the Germans identify as Tutsi? Who did they identify as Hutu?
2. According to the Germans, where did the Tutsis come from? Is there evidence now to support their claim?
3. How are the Tutsis and the Hutus similar?
4. How is ethnicity of a child determined if the parents come from mixed ethnic groups?
5. What is a cultural difference between the two groups?
6. Who did the Germans and later the Belgians favor: Tutsi or Hutu and why?
7. What was the result of this policy?

Page 7-10(What is Genocide?) (green)

1. When was the term “genocide” coined? By whom?
2. Why did he come up with the new term?
3. What does Genocide mean, literally?
4. What is the Genocide Convention? What does it aim to do?
5. How does the Convention define Genocide?
6. When was the Genocide convention initiated?
7. When did the US sign the Genocide Convention?
8. What Genocides have occurred since the US signed the treaty?

Page 11-13 (Rwanda: How the Genocide Happened) (purple)

1. When did the Genocide take place? How long did it last?
2. How many Tutsis died?
3. What was the initial reason for the start of the violence?
4. What helped fuel the animosity between the Tutsis and the Hutus?
5. Who helped the Belgians rule? Who took control when the Belgians left?
6. Who were the RPF?
7. What was their goal?
8. Who was responsible for the murder of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi?
9. What happened after they were murdered?
10. Who were the Interahamwe? What was their goal?
11. What did the RPF do when the president was murdered?
12. What happened when the RPF reached Kilgali?
13. What were two results of the RPF victory in Rwanda?

Page 15-19 (Interview with Phillip Gourevitch- These are the questions put to him by the interviewer. Please give a summary of Mr. Gourevitch’s responses) (pink)

1. What is the most significant thing to understand about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda?
2. Who are the Hutus and the Tutsis?
3. What is the distinction to you between civil war and genocide?
4. In this case was it a breakdown of a civil war?
5. Who was the Interahamwe?
6. Who was the informant who sent the Jan 11th fax warning of the genocide?
7. What was so remarkable about the fax?
8. How did the UN respond to the fax?

Page 20-24 (Interview with Phillip Gourevitch- con’t) (blue)

1. Why did they tell them not to go after the gun caches and to tell the president?
2. What happened to the president’s plane and what did that spark?
3. At that point, what role did the national radio play?
4. What happened to the Belgian soldiers and why? Was it intentional?
5. What were the Hutus’ intention by killing the blue helmets?
6. What was the Clinton administration’s policy?
7. Iqbal Riza [U.N.] said, "Certainly in the first few days, neither the people on the ground or we here knew that this was a planned genocide. We knew that fighting had resumed, and we all viewed it as a breakdown of the cease-fire." How would you respond to that? What did they know at U.N.?
8. They didn’t put two and two together?
9. Characterize the speed, the brutality and the scope of what was happening/
10. The expatriate rescue: what happened?
11. Anyidoho, who was the Ghanaian commander on the ground, said, "We had enough troops ... we just missed a fleeting opportunity." What was missed? What opportunity was there when these troops were on the ground?

Page 25-29 (Interview with Phillip Gourevitch- con’t) (green)
1. Explain the scene when the Security Council vote is taken, and Rwanda is one of the member states, and everybody seems deferential to each other. What's wrong?
2. What could or should the world do, even without military intervention?
3. From the Clinton administration's standpoint and the State Department briefings, what was the dilemma they faced in not calling this a genocide?
4. Characterize the political calculations made by the Clinton administration at the time.
5. What would be the cost at home?
6. It feels like there was a diplomatic equivalent of the Powell doctrine going on: Only go into a situation where you know you can win. Don't take risks, regardless of moral obligation.
7. Presidential Directive 25: How did it come to be? Was it in response to Somalia?
8. Why on May 17th did the Security Council decide to increase the U.N. force?
9. How did the genocide end?
10. Who was in these camps?
11. How did the West respond to the setting up of these camps?
12. What is the Western response to the bodies flowing down river?

Page 30-33 (Interview with Phillip Gourevitch- con’t) (purple)
1. Why was it easier to respond to the camps than to the genocide itself?
2. Describe the season of apologies: Annan, Albright, Clinton going to Africa to apologize. What's that about?
3. Did any of them take personal responsibility?
4. What did you think when you heard the apologies?
5. What does it mean for people to applaud Clinton for simply saying the word "genocide?"
6. What did it all mean in the end?
7. How do you understand it was possible that it happened?
8. What does the Rwandan genocide say to the promise of the Genocide Convention?
9. Relate the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Is Rwanda the most clear-cut example since WWII?
10. What is motivating U.S. policy?
11. Is there a lesson or something to be said about going from the promise of the Genocide Convention to the pragmatism of our policy in Rwanda?

Page 34 (Recording the images of the Genocide) (purple)
1. What was Adam Scotti’s reaction to the memorials of the genocide? Are his reactions justified? How?

Page 36 (Rwanda: Can Art Bring Peace?) (everyone)
1. Why is art a legitimate outlet for the survivors of the genocide?
2. How can art bring healing?